Poem

“I have been even as a man that hath no strength, free among the dead . . . Shall thy loving-kindness be showed in the grave?” —Psalm 88

Some days I feel as old as father Abraham,doddering father of a teen-aged daughterwho last week attended her first “real” concert,at the crowded Aragon Ballroom in Uptown.When will my own days feel real again,the frozen clock hands begin to turn again?When will this chemical burning in the veinsstop, and hope, perhaps, be recompensed?I wear this long wool coat against the coldthat hurts me, covered with two scarves,my face covered to avoid any feelingof cobwebs, with their every thread feelinglike a tiny razor blade slicing the skin.There is no ounce of benignity in this feeling.Maybe that is why the winter mask,last week found at Target, most accuratelyresembles a terrorist accessory, all black-hooded with eye slits. Were I to wear it,I would appear on campus like an ISISrecruit, no doubt a proud servantin his mind, clouded by the violenceof the mission and sentence he honors.O the necessary horrors, those airstrikesoccurring in the body’s battleground, leveledat the cells. If I were to wear the black hood,guise of a hangman (not the one hanged),I fear that campus security would target me,bucolic space locked down in emergencyprotocol. That’s all I would be: self-terrorist,strapped with the various wires of my sickness.